Siemens and Materialise have partnered to integrate Materialise’s additive manufacturing capabilities into Siemens’ NX software, to streamline the design to manufacturing process for AM.

Building on the partnership announced in January, the new solution enables NX computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) software to prepare CAD models for powder bed fusion and material jetting 3D printing processes, reducing design-to-print times by 30 percent.

“Today’s announcement represents a huge leap forward in making additive manufacturing a mainstream production practice for our customers,” said Zvi Feuer, senior vice president of Manufacturing Engineering Software for Siemens PLM Software. “Until now, the additive manufacturing process required manufacturers to work with two separate systems – one for product design, and another to prepare that design for 3D printing. The data translation issues and lack of associativity between these two systems created a process that was time consuming and subject to errors. By eliminating these issues, we are helping to expand the adoption of additive manufacturing as a universally accepted production tool.”

NX is used throughout multiple industries to design some of the world’s most sophisticated products whilst Materialise Magics 3D Print Suite enables all commonly-adopted AM processes for end-part manufacturing.

Today’s announcement seamlessly links NX with Materialise lattice technology, support structures design, 3D nesting, build tray preparation, and build processors framework technology to eliminate data translation, conversions and ensures that changes to digital product design models, are automatically and associatively reflected in the 3D print jobs. The result is greater model accuracy, higher quality and a much faster design to production process.

“Additive manufacturing is a reality now, even in highly regulated markets like aerospace and healthcare,” says Johan Pauwels, Executive Vice President at Materialise. “By bringing together solutions from Siemens and Materialise, we are optimising and simplifying the workflow for design, engineering and manufacturing of components. For the past 25 years, our neutral backbone of solutions has pushed the boundaries of additive manufacturing technologies. We’re pleased to partner with Siemens, who truly understands large-scale industrial manufacturing environments and shares our belief that designers and engineers can create better products if additive manufacturing is embedded into their mainstream business processes.”

An initial set of technology is available in the most current version of NX (NX 11.0.1) via new modules targeted for additive manufacturing.

Andreas Saar, VP Manufacturing Engineering Solutions at Siemens, will deliver a keynote presentation on how AM is impacting the manufacturing industry at the Materialise World Summit in Brussels on 20th April, 2017.